Nervous Breakdowns and How to Avoid Them

by Charles David Musgrove

Excess of food.

The average diet of the Anglo-Saxon is vastly in excess of his needs. Especially does this refer to the amount of food taken on Sundays. Why we should choose to celebrate the Sabbath by eating more and taking less exercise is a mystery. We often meet with people who complain of feeling “Mondayish,” as they call it. They think it is due to the reaction consequent on resuming the week’s work, whereas it is nothing more than the fact of their having eaten too much on the previous day. For many people who are abstemious enough during the week-days take more at every meal on Sundays. They have something extra for breakfast, and take it at a later hour than usual; they have a hearty dinner midday, and take cake and jam for tea, completing the day by a hearty supper, in which cold meat and pickles generally take a large share. And all “because it is Sunday.”

Now if such persons can be prevailed upon to make a light breakfast, eat moderately at dinner, limit their food at tea to a biscuit or a piece of bread and butter, and finish up with a rational supper, they will find that on Monday mornings they are as fresh as on any other day of the week; in fact, probably much fresher. It would be a good thing for the community if people would make Sunday a day of rest in regard to diet as well as other things.

Diet at middle age.

In speaking of butcher’s meat, we pointed out that less of this is necessary in the case of people approaching middle age. The same remark applies, though not with the same urgency perhaps, to food of all sorts. As people grow older the system loses some of its power of throwing off the residue of waste matter, and it is of vital importance, therefore, that people should exercise even more care and discrimination than at any previous period in their lives.

Yet as a rule they tend to eat more rather than less. And the consequent strain upon the system is the starting-point of many a breakdown. For not only is the system less capable of eliminating the waste, but the various organs have less power to support each other when any of them suffer in consequence of the extra effort demanded of them.

Diet for the obese.

The question of a suitable diet for stout people is one that bulks largely in the mind of the public to-day. At one time the neurotic patient was always supposed to be thin. It was the fat ones who kept people alive and in a good humour. It was all a myth, of course, and there was no truth in it. It is all very well to talk about “Laugh and grow fat,” but whether fat people are addicted to laughing is another matter. For gradually it began to dawn upon the world that they were rather a heavy, stolid set of folk after all.

Then, to its surprise, it found that stout people are more liable to neurasthenia than thin ones. In any medical paper to-day you are almost sure to see an article on neurasthenia and obesity.

The result of all this has been that there are more people wanting to get thin than thin people desirous of getting stout. The question is how they are to do it. It is generally supposed that it can only be achieved by eating less. This is quite correct in one way. They must eat less, but of certain articles of diet. It does not follow that they must always rise from the table craving for food. It is a healthy custom, as we have pointed out, for people to get up from the table feeling that they could take more, but for some to be doomed constantly to leave their meals as hungry as when they sat down would be a hardship that few would submit to.